How Can Rational People Believe So Much Hooey?
Some Facts of Reality
by Which to Gain Objective Knowledge,
Especially of What is Right and Wrong
by
Eric Paul Nolte
As airline pilots, we have a captive audience in the cockpit. Not taking advantage of this situation is a matter of compassion or character. Still, we sometimes talk about an amazing range of subjects.
I could write many essays on some of the topics that arise on the flight deck, but I am starting with this one because I find the subject and its setting compelling, and because I just wrote an essay on some of the problems of faith.
So here is the question: how can it be that so many of these pilots I work with, men and women who are really squared away and run every detail of their lives absolutely ship shape-- how can they run their lives so rigorously by the light of reason, and yet assert that their most important values in life are rooted in a set of religious beliefs that defy all rational belief? How can so many otherwise rational people believe so much hooey?
But first, I should address the possibility that you may be reeling at the notion that while they are in charge of your precious soul, your tender hide, your pilots might be blathering away about the most abstruse matters when they're supposed to be riding herd on this tender tube of aluminum and other materials, this technological marvel, there at six miles above the ocean, and hurtling through the most hostile environment on earth at a velocity of nine miles every minute. Relax. Here's the situation:
When we reach cruise altitude, we tidy up the flight deck, finish all our fussy little preparations and get everything configured for crossing over the North Pole, or the Pond over to Europe, or wherever. At that point, there is usually very little work to do for many hours. One little channel of the brain suffices to mind the store and make sure we stay on course and don't blunder into storms or other hazards, and that George, the autopilot, has everything right side up and pointing in the right direction. Once every 45 minutes or so, we cross another waypoint and verify that a mandatory report was sent to our company and to ATC, and we then compare the actual versus the estimated fuel consumption and a few other important parameters. The flight attendants kindly see to it that we are fed and watered. And it's otherwise all very quiet.
A blowhard pilot could take advantage of the situation, pull out a soapbox and begin making campaign speeches for some treasured crusade.
But mostly we just sit back, sip coffee, take in the stunning view from our office, read things like flight manuals to brush up on some arcane question that might have recently arisen about the airplane systems or flight operations, or study the charts for the destination airport and airways. It would not be unprecedented to see an occasional newspaper or magazine. The demands of flight, at that point, are very, very low. We are all vastly experienced and have an acute ability to sense anything out of the expected. Moreover, anything that even begins to stray out of line will provoke a little yellow warning light (or a red light, if serious enough) and a printed and aural message that will begin chirping or dinging or honking at us to rouse even the slowest wit. Not to put it in a morbid way, but the flight deck of a modern airliner is like a little graveyard, in which every piece of equipment, every switch, instrument, and light, is a like a little tombstone and a monument, a testament, to the human capacity to learn from our experience. All that equipment was installed as the result of some pilot who died, and the installation of which now makes it less likely that anyone will ever suffer another fatal accident on account of those mistakes.
I don't think of myself as a blowhard, but I do try to hold this evaluation, like all my beliefs, in a context that is open to revision in the light of new evidence. Although I certainly have some strong opinions on matters about which I've thought long and hard, I try not to bulldoze anybody with whom I disagree. In fact, I wear as a badge of pride, the fact that I seem to be able to talk with almost anybody about anything. Even when I disagree with someone, I try hard to keep the discussion civil.
As the captain, the other crew members are obliged to honor my position in the chain of command, up there in the nose cone, but I am happy to say that we no longer practice anything like the rigid, "Captain as God" system of crew management, as was the case when I was a wet young pup in the 1970s. Nowadays we encourage everybody on the flight deck always to speak up, especially if there are any doubts or questions about the operation of the airplane. By this means, every brain on deck is fully engaged, and not cowering in monkish servitude and obedience while the captain does something stupid, like grazing the top of a ridge line short of the runway. If you had asked the first officer or the engineer, "Why didn't you tell the boss he was about to hit the ridge?" the answer was always, "He was flying, it wasn't my place, and when he wants my opinion he asks me, and besides I thought he saw it. Moreover, in the end, it's not my place."
Even though I am the captain, I try to be sensitive to the other pilots' feelings. I am genuinely interested in what makes other people tick, and to learn how others have come to believe what they hold important. Nothing to me is more interesting than talking about the Big Questions and the puzzlements and conundrums of life, love, and the cosmos.
* * *
So let me pose the question again: how can so many smart people, who run their lives absolutely by the light of reason, nevertheless hold that their most important values in life are religious beliefs that defy any grounds for rational belief? How can so many otherwise rational people believe so much hooey?
You can't just plunge into these deepest of intellectual waters without a long preparation. But the news out of the middle east always raises religious questions, and talking about any of it will draw us into these waters.
Question: How can loving parents strap bomb vests on their children and send them out to blow up random strangers on busses in Tel Aviv?
Answer: Religion. Well, there is in fact the religion that must not be named which is the source of this particularly murderous insanity today, but let's leave it, for the moment, with this universal label, "religion." You may already know why this particular religion today is not alone in having a long and murderous history. I promise to revisit the matter momentarily.
How can anybody believe the kind of murderous hogwash that leads them to use their children as suicidal instruments of random, mass murder? It's their religion. They grew up with it, they've never known anybody who has ever questioned it. More than that, remember it's a capital crime to question their religion, and, you know, ultimately it's a matter of faith. But Christians and Jews have faith too. But Christians and Jews are not strapping bomb vests on their children. So what's the difference? They all believe in the God of Abraham...
Before you know it, a conversation like this eventually shores up at the question of god.
Do you believe in God? Yes, they'll tell me.
You can ask what they mean by god, but eventually it all comes down to asking, "Why do you believe in God?"
Now here is what I find astonishing: the answer is almost always explained with reference to natural phenomena which they view as overwhelming evidence for the existence of god. Not always the God of Abraham, but at least Nature's God, as Jefferson and Adams would have put it.
They almost always say they have perfectly rational grounds for believing in God. They do not initially profess their belief in God as a matter of faith, although, when pressed on the matter, they will eventually feel compelled to say, yeah, ultimately it's all a matter of faith. Yet even when they invoke faith, it becomes clear that they do not mean anything like a belief in the truth of a proposition in the absence of evidence, which is the key dictionary denotation of faith. They never say they believe things without proof. In their minds, faith simply means the intellectual contents of whatever a person believes. Faith is synonymous with belief itself. And nearly all these pilots I've talked with believe that the existence of God is proved by logic and evidence!
Okay, so they are are naifs. In their minds, God explains the inexplicable, and they haven't studied logic or philosophy by which they might find better explanations (I hasten to add that if we're talking about the mainstream academic postmodern varieties of philosophy, it might be a good thing that these pilots are thus naive, but, as I shall argue below, I believe there is good philosophy and reliable logic by which to test our beliefs.)
* * *
By the way, my sample here is drawn over the course of something like 40 years, and is mostly male, white, heterosexual, and Christian, but there have been many, many women, blacks, Jews, gays, and even two Muslims, both men. They've all been to college, many have advanced degrees, and there is a wide range of talent and accomplishment up there on the flight deck.
If you ask them about the Bible's talking snakes, talking bushes on the road to Damascus that not only talk but burn without being consumed by the fire, or you ask them about virgin births, or resurrection after death, or any of the other miracles, they're passed off with a shrug and a nod at metaphor and how the primitive peoples who wrote these books knew little about the world. It just doesn't matter to them, and it does not impinge on their perceived, perfectly rational grounds for believing in God.
Now you point out that their argument for the existence of god is the Argument from Design, which is essentially that the world displays astonishing order, that things don't just happen in an orderly way by accident, and therefore some divine intelligence must have brought about this orderly universe. What's wrong with this?
Well, if the apparent design of the universe requires a Designer, surely the Designer displays an even more astonishing order than the thing designed, so why doesn't the Designer require a Designer to explain itself? Be consistent, now! To say the designer does not require a designer would thus be a contradiction, and would lead to the logical fallacy of an infinite regress. So now you have not explained the question with an answer rooted in observable nature, you have offered a riddle in answer to a puzzle, a conundrum to explain a bafflement, a mystical, ghostly other-worldly explanation as the answer to an earthly question. You haven't answered the question at all, you've simply pushed it down the road.
Oy, geeezz!-- the pilot will say, hands held high, now you're going off into la la land. Who needs to go that far? It's like asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin!
For the average pilot, indeed, who needs to go deeper than the cozy, comforting, unchallenged argument from Design? It's enough, already! If we are going to understand the physics of why airplanes fly, we can learn enough to acquire a practical mastery of a pilot's skills without having to learn all the higher math we would need to understand the baffling world of quantum mechanics.
Except ... that this argument from design is not enough to answer the question of god. This argument for the existence of God is not a practical solution to the matter. Far from it! This argument for god still leaves open the very basis of the dogfight between all of these other warring religions, namely, that each of them is asserting its own absolutes above all the others, and the fact that these ideas all contradict those of the other religions! It's a Tower of Absolute Babel.
And more: truly, the argument from design for the existence of god is bushwa, it explains nothing!
Moreover, there is a long list of arguments for god that have challenged the best minds that ever lived, and, in the end, we find that not a one of these arguments is valid, not one of them will hold water, logically, much less walk on water.
So what? My colleagues are intelligent, decent people, and are mostly devoted to being good people and to doing good in the world. In fact, it is this seeking after goodness, it is the pleasures of being in a community of the like-minded who enjoy each other's company, and helping each other out-- it is all of these things that motivates most of them to be religious.
* * *
To most religious people, religion means the very source of goodness. If you ask them, they almost invariably say, echoing Dostoevsky, that if there is no god issuing rewards, threats, and punishments beyond the grave, then everything is permitted, so without God, life on earth would become a brutish war of predatory aggression of all against all. Without God, there are no standards for right action, no answers to how to be a good person in the world.
I disagree with the idea that a god is required to set standards or good and bad.
For one thing, there is no god.
No! They'll splutter indignantly, how can you say there is no god? They may then move on to asserting an alternative definition of god. Alright, they say, alright! What if by god you simply mean the impersonal forces that obviously animate the universe? Something is going on here!
Well, okay, there are certainly forces at work in the universe, and we have not yet broken the code on what all these forces are, so what's wrong with calling these forces "god?"
Or what about the idea that some people's definition of god is simply the concept to which they appeal when they square off to the many enduring mysteries of existence? We do not have all the answers! Why not call this feeling of awe, god? Why not call God this cosmic sense of awe and astonishment at the beauty of the earth and at the way we feel when standing before all these enduring mysteries of life and the universe? We don't have all the answers, so what's wrong with calling our feelings about all these things, god?
Well, I share the belief that there are forces we have yet to understand. I agree that there are enduring mysteries of existence. I agree that all these things can inspire deep feelings of cosmic awe before the beauty and mystery of life.
But I do not agree that calling these feelings "god" will do any good. Why not? Because we already have this word, god, and it already has a definition. Adding more definitions to the long list of definitions of the word will do nothing more than add to the problem of equivocation and provide grounds for even further confusion!
Remember also that this idea of god already comes with a long and bloody history. Untold millions have been murdered in the name of god, and millions more will surely die unless we in the world improve our rational understanding of the nature of existence and our relationship to it.
When I say there is no god, I mean the obviously true fact that there is no place and no entity anywhere on earth where any two people can go together to ask God questions and expect to hear divinely confirmed answers delivered in a voice sounding maybe like Charlton Heston, portraying Moses in "The Ten Commandments," that everybody can hear simultaneously and agree on what words are being said, and also agree that it is God who is incontestably saying these words.
There is no public god, no god available in a public square. Who in their right mind can deny this? There is no address, no phone number, no state of the union addresses being issued over the networks or the internet for all to hear. There simply is no god.
Instead, we have billions of Homo saps on earth who embrace countless texts which they claim to be the sacred, inerrant word of god, and all of these holy texts conflict with each other's pronouncements on many radically important points. Moreover, these holy texts are all said to be validated by the testimony of credible witnesses to all kinds of miracles like virgin births, flying carpets, talking snakes, resurrections of dead people, and so forth.
But these religions are all making claims that conflict with each other! They can't all be right. They could all be wrong, but they can't all be right. So how can we know which, if any, is right? And what about the possibility I mentioned above, of a new and better definition of god that might bring everybody together?
Another definition of god will not diminish the level of confusion and disagreement here.
We need a replacement for the concept of god that will point to the universal facts of reality by which we can say with confidence what is objectively true and false, and what is right and wrong.
Ha! This is precisely what most of the world believes to be impossible!
The religious believe that absolute knowledge of right and wrong is possible, but only because God gave us the absolutes.
The postmodern left believes it is altogether impossible to name such absolutes. As least as far back as David Hume, in the 18th century, we have these allegedly unbridgeable chasms. One is said to be an insuperable problem with the nature of induction that renders all our universals and generalizations untenable. A related problem is with the generalization of causality. Still another uncrossable sea is called the "is-ought" dichotomy, which is the pronouncement that there are no facts of reality (nothing which is) by which we can derive any normative values (which would be to name something which ought to be as a result of this fact of reality.)
(See Quee Nelson's wonderful book, The Slightest Philosophy, for a devastating stake in the heart of this vampire stream of thought, which has delivered us into the arms of postmodernism and the idea that all judgments are social constructs, laden with warping theories that render objectivity impossible.)
So here we have religion which says there are moral absolutes, but only God makes them absolute, and a secular opposition which says there are no absolutes at all (except for the one that denies that there are any absolutes) and therefore all pronouncements on right and wrong are entirely subjective, socially constructed, and tribal. I am persuaded that these are profoundly false alternatives that do not exhaust the possibilities for us to consider on the moral and normative realm.
* * *
It turns out that we do in fact have some earthly standards, some facts of reality, to which we can turn for our questions on what is true or false, and right or wrong. I am persuaded that there are some perfectly good answers by which we can dismantle these unexploded mines on the killing fields of religion and postmodern philosophy. (The suicide bomber might represent the religious problem, and for the postmodern problem, think of a killer in the Cambodian genocide, like Pol Pot, with an AK-47 in one hand, and copies of Rousseau and Foucault in the other.) The absolutism of religion and ironically absolutist postmodern nihilism are pointless, false conundrums that have inspired people to kill and enslave each other, and there are perfectly good answers to them. These answers flow out of the stream of philosophy that begins with Aristotle and now reaches Ayn Rand and many others whose work carries on in this tradition.
Aristotle lived 2,400 years ago, and Ayn Rand's major works have mostly been available for half a century. How come many more people don't see that we have some good answers that can serve to dismantle the insanity?
Well, for one thing, maybe the most basic fact about human nature is that, while we certainly have instincts, these do not comprise a comprehensive knowledge of life, and so we are not born knowing what survival and flourishing demand of us. We have to figure it out by reason and observation. We pass this knowledge on to our children and they pass it on to theirs, along with any new knowledge they may have accumulated along the way. Reality can prune away the craziest ideas we have because these craziest of ideas tend to kill off those who believe them. But, obviously, we are a long, long way from having all the insane ideas carved away by natural selection, and see them drop to history's cutting room floor.
For another thing, it turns out, as Richard Dawkins eloquently frames the matter, human beings are hard-wired mostly to believe what we hear as we're growing up. Why does nearly everybody grow up believing the religion they were born into? We have a deep tendency to believe our elders! We believe what our parents and teachers tell us! Even the crazy stuff! To the point here, especially the crazy stuff!
Another matter here is that we are not born with minds that strive for independent thinking. Intellectual independence is a high virtue that must be discovered, or taught to the young by those who already hold this idea as a virtue. We live in world where many cultures absolutely revile such independence of mind, and for some of these cultures, critical thinking and independence of mind are capital crimes. They will kill you for daring to offer a critical thought!
It is simply unrealistic to expect that ordinary people will display extraordinary independence of mind when nobody in their whole circle of friends, family, and acquaintance has ever displayed the first whiff of a question about, say, the existence of god, or to have an inclination to question any of the tribe's beliefs, or to exhibit a powerful curiosity about anything. The status quo embodies a powerful inertia.
For yet another thing, consider what I myself call the real original sin of humanity, which is confirmation bias. You may already know that this the hapless tendency of everybody to filter out anything we do not already understand or believe. Granted, there is survival value to an animal that possesses this reticular activation system, which allows us to filter out of the tsunami of sensory data that forever floods our senses, things like our own name, uttered across a smokey crowded room, or the cry of our baby from a distant crib, heard above the street noise outside. But it is a deep problem too! Confirmation bias tends to make us deaf and blind to anything we do not already believe to be true and right. The only antidote I know is to practice a ruthless intellectual honesty and force ourselves to pay attention to ideas with which we know we will disagree, and try sympathetically to understand why anybody in their right mind would hold such beliefs.
Another reason for why the world remains pretty much blind to the facts of reality by which we can come to hold objective knowledge of what is right and wrong: the Iron Law of Oligarchy, by which small groups of highly motivated elites tend to get their way over large groups of people who do not care nearly as much about the issues that so arouse the passions of the elites. It remains a very large majority of people who believe in these opposing false alternatives of religious absolutism and secular skepticism. The inertia of those who hold these orthodox views is enormous, and is militantly arrayed against the success of any alternatives.
* * *
Now, we live at a time that remains at an abysmally low level of philosophical development, in my humble opinion. Academic philosophy continues to take tea at the table of postmodernism with the Mad Hatter in Alice's Wonderland.
Philosophy is the discipline that should give us the power of a solvent to scrub the worst absurdities out of our minds. Don't tell me that by this formulation I am advocating brain washing! I am asserting that there are profoundly destructive ideas in the world, and it is the discipline of good philosophy by which one can learn the intellectual technology to separate truth from nonsense, and of right from wrong.
But most people do not understand that this is what philosophy is or can be. Far from it. Even worse, most people agree (and yes, there are excellent survey data to support this claim) that there are no grounds apart from religion and arbitrary social constructs by which to support any ideas on morality, or on anything in the normative realm. There is in science a limited belief in the means by which we can distinguish truth from falsehood, but these truths are generally said to be delimited and contingent, never certain, and never available to any claims of a normative or ethical nature.
Even worse, we have a whole tribe of mostly university academics whose minds have been poisoned to some extent by the ravings of nihilistic postmodern skepticism that deny even the possibility of knowing anything with confidence. These are people like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Stanley Fish, Frank Lentricchia, Andrea Dworkin, Richard Rorty, and so forth. These thinkers have all claimed to be the true inheritors of philosophy, properly understood (not that they believe that anything can be "properly understood.") By their view our every utterance is irredeemably incoherent. There is no "reality," whatever the hell that might be, no world or self to have an intrinsic nature, there is no correspondence between the world and any truth we might try to assert about it. We have deconstructed reason, truth, and the very idea of any such correspondence! Quoted by Stephen Hicks in Explaining Postmodernism, Foucault writes, "Reason is the ultimate language of madness." By this view, we are trapped helplessly inside our own minds.
It would be lovely to leave the postmodernist skeptics to their own nonsense, but, ironically, they continue to wield enormous intellectual influence in the world, and so they must be addressed.
So, what are these facts of reality that can give rise to objective knowledge of right and wrong?
Ayn Rand got it right here:
In the shortest thumbnail sketch I can make, let me first to draw your attention to the fact that there is one basic alternative in the universe: existence or non-existence. All life forms face a fundamental alternative: life or death.
Nature provides every life form, plant and animal alike, with a basic means of survival. For each life form, the good consists of the set of things which allow it to survive, the bad, or evil, are those things which threaten its life.
For a human being, survival and flourishing depend on rationality, observation and logic applied to the evidence of experience; in a word: reason.
To survive, we must take certain actions to assure food and shelter (or else someone else must act on our behalf.) Which actions? We must discover what is efficacious. We need knowledge of what supports us. This knowledge must be discovered by reason.
The good, therefore, for a human being is life, its own life. Life is a property of each individual. The good is the set of things which support an individual's life. Life is the standard of the good.
Nothing is possible without its life. No action, no thought, no value judgment, nothing is possible without its life.
Think about this: one's life is the very grounds for making any value judgments, including even the decision to take one's own life, as might be the case with some poor soul who is stricken by a fatal and hopelessly painful illness, and who therefore decides that the pain of daily existence trumps any pleasures remaining in life.
So life is the foundational good, the very standard of the good. Everything that threatens its life is the evil.
Let me flesh this out in just a little bigger way: if we want to live, then we must hold some values by which to guide the actions we take in order to support our lives.
A value is something that inspires us to take action in order to get it. A value is the goal of the actions we take in order to acquire it. Reason is the cardinal value that supports our ability to live because reason allows us to acquire the knowledge of what we must do if we are to succeed in reaching our goals.
Our nature endows us with free will, the power to choose to pay attention to one thing rather than another. We must choose a purpose, which will be the happiness that we want our life to be about, and it is this end towards which we must then use our reason to achieve.
Self-esteem is the basic energy that moves our feet out of bed in the morning; it is the sum of two things: first, the knowledge we achieve that provides us with the certainty that we are competent to survive; and, second, the unshakable conviction that we are worthy of happiness.
Virtue is not some musty old idea that is said to be its own reward, not some ancient battle axe that threatens our happiness, but is instead a means by which to achieve a value. Most to the point here: the starting point of goodness and virtue is not self-sacrifice for the lives of others. The purpose of our lives is not to give up our lives for the benefit of everybody else, but to enjoy our own lives.
Virtues are the means by which we achieve our values. The purpose of our lives is to live our life and achieve our own flourishing.
The cardinal values are achieved by employing the primary virtues. Among these virtues are rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, pride, and benevolence. There are many other virtues as well, of course, such as courage, confidence, curiosity, and an unlimited number of others, all arrayed so as to support the values pursued.
If flourishing and happiness are the purpose of our lives, then a predatory, grasping abuse of other people can never be a viable or enduring means for achieving these values. We achieve our values by dealing with other people voluntarily, respecting the fact that their purpose in life, like ours, should rightly be the pursuit of their own happiness, and that we can greatly enhance everyone's ability to achieve this happiness by dealing with each other as traders, exchanging value for value, to mutual advantage.
A proper development of these ideas requires a hefty book (many of which have already been written in this Aristotelian/Randian stream I have mentioned above), but this the essence of the factual basis for judging what is right and wrong, in its most distilled form.
All of this is to draw attention to why the postmodern skeptics are mistaken about the impossibility of an ethics rooted in the facts of reality, and also for why all the warring religious absolutists are mistaken about the mystical basis for their absolutes, when there are perfectly good, earthly facts of reality by which to acquire objective knowledge and values.
I want to flesh out more of this, another time, when I will turn to the question I keep running into with the college students in my circle, namely: the cultural relativists' utterly helpless inability to find unassailable moral grounds on which to condemn those who believe that the highest good is to strap bomb vests on their children and send them out to blow up random strangers.
The postmodern skeptics claim that there are no objective grounds by which to make such a condemnation. The religious absolutists, many of them anyway, are actually among those who believe that there is no greater glory or good than killing infidels, and meanwhile the world is wriggling with all kinds of religious people who affirm other absolute truths which conflict with each other's ideas hopelessly and irreconcilably.
There is a way out. Stay calm, carry on, and apply logic to the evidence of experience. Eventually, better ideas will come to mind.
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2014.1114
